No Man's Sky News

UPDATE 21/11/18: In case you had any doubt of its veracity, Hello Games has confirmed that No Man's Sky's previously leaked Visions update is indeed a thing that is coming. And, better yet, it's a thing that's coming tomorrow, Thursday 22nd November, on PC, Xbox One, and PS4.

Based on Hello Games' announcement, there's not a lot to add that wasn't already in yesterday's leaked trailer. However, it's well worth changing out the official Visions patch notes on the No Man's Sky website, as they contain a huge number of screenshots, and some more granular detail, illustrating the increased variety that tomorrow's update will bring.

ORIGINAL STORY 20/11/18: Visions, a big new update for Hello Games' interplanetary exploration adventure No Man's Sky, has been inadvertently revealed after fans discovered an unlisted new trailer on the developer's official YouTube channel.

Sci-fi sandbox No Man's Sky has just received its latest big update, The Abyss, which focuses on underwater gameplay.

For this update, developer Hello Games has implemented a new submersible craft, the Nautilon, plus improved underwater visuals, exploration amd building. Now is the time to realise your dream of building an aquatic utopia - because when has that ever gone wrong?

Intriguingly, there's a "dark" new narrative to uncover named The Dreams of the Deep.

Hello Games has unveiled The Abyss - an 'eerie' new update for its exploratory sci-fi sim No Man's Sky, which is due to launch some time next week.

The news comes via a posting on the No Man's Sky website, which revealed that while the majority of Hello Games' team is concentrating on the game's ongoing weekly updates, bug fixes and improvements, "a handful have been working on something else, our first titled update since NEXT".

Hello Games hasn't yet detailed what will be included in the new update, known as The Abyss, but did reveal that it will focus "on some of the eerier elements of No Man's Sky, in keeping with the theme of this season."

Prior to the launch of No Man's Sky's massive NEXT update last month, developer Hello Games revealed that its psychedelic space sim would soon recieve an ongoing schedule of special live in-game community events - and the first of these is now underway on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.

According to Hello Games' latest blog post, No Man's Sky's first season of weekly content and community events has now been planned, and today's debut adventure is available to all players that have completed the first Space Anomaly mission.

"Specialist Polo and Priest Entity Nada, blinking around the edge of reality in their anomalous spacecraft, are broadcasting a request for assistance", says Hello Games, "Polo's advanced boundary monitoring equipment has located a previously undetected iteration of the universe and they urgently need explorers to examine and explore this glitch in reality".

Hello Games has detailed what's been resolved in the latest No Man's Sky patch.

In an update on the official website, the post confirmed update 1.55 has now rolled out across PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and includes fixes for a UI memory leak, a number of crashes triggered by plants, freighters, and by creating a race track in a borrowed Exocraft, as well as a number of other performance and gameplay improvements.

The patch also resolves issues where players would get stuck in The Purge and Ghost in the Machine missions, as well as a specific bug in which Sentinels would endlessly chase players unless they'd completed the final Weapon Specialist mission.

No Man's Sky's impressive NEXT update came out last week and the response has been generally positive. Over the weekend, in fact, more than 97,000 concurrent players logged in to Hello Games' revamped space sim on PC - and, even now, it's the fifth most played game on Steam.

UPDATE 9.30pm: Following this morning's news that the GOG.com version of No Man's Sky won't be getting the NEXT update's much-touted new multiplayer features until "later in the year", the retailer has announced that it's now offering refunds to those affected.

In a post on its website, GOG said, "We know that many of you expressed disappointment about the lack of the new multiplayer feature in the latest update to No Man's Sky on GOG.COM. While we have limited control over games and content updates, we want you to have the best and risk-free experience possible when you buy a game on GOG.COM."

GOG continued, "Although Hello Games chose not to offer refunds over missing game content to our users and instead promised to bring the missing multiplayer content later this year, we understand that some of you might not be willing to wait."

No Man's Sky creator Sean Murray has written a heartfelt message to reassure fans that the developer will pay more attention to the game's community in future. This comes only a few days after Murray broke his silence on the problems the game faced at launch.

Hello Games has unveiled its first trailer for No Man's Sky's major, multiplayer-focussed NEXT update, which comes to PC, PS4 and - for the first time - Xbox One, on July 24th.

NEXT's flagship addition, of course, is multiplayer, which enables a small group to team up for bouts of planetary exploration, building, space combat, racing, questing, and more - all of which will be playable in both first- or third-person perspective. It'll be possible to bump into - or prey on - random players too.

That's a genuinely exciting, and very welcome, addition to what's a sometimes lonely game of exploration and expansion - but, speaking as someone who's been thoroughly ensnared by the strangely hypnotic meanderings of No Man's Sky as it's grown through multiple updates, I'm just as excited about some of the other new features briefly highlighted in the latest trailer.

No Man's Sky's next big update, which introduces a proper multiplayer mode to Hello Games' ambitious space exploration sim, will launch on July 24th.

The news comes via Hello Games' Sean Murray, who made the announcement during an appearance on Microsoft's latest Inside Xbox livestream. Murray also spent a few moments offering a broad overview of the update's new multiplayer features.

Next, as the update is known, was described as No Man's Sky's "biggest update so far" when it was revealed in March, and Murray says that it will fuse a "full multiplayer experience" to the game's increasingly rich blend of survival, exploration, crafting, flying, and questing.

Hello Games has announced that its ever-expanding space exploration sim No Man's Sky will get its next big update this summer, and will also be heading to Xbox One.

The new update has been given the name NEXT, because, says Hello Games' Sean Murray, "it's an important next step on a longer journey for us and the community." No Man's Sky previous update, Atlas Rises, launched in August last year.

There's no word yet on what, exactly, NEXT will bring to No Man's Sky, but Murray calls it the "biggest update so far". It's seemingly so big, in fact, that it even gets its own logo.

No Man's Sky's entertainingly convoluted Waking Titan ARG appears to be back, and fans are picking apart its mysterious messages in a bid to work out what might be next for Hello Games' ever-expanding space game.

The work to improve No Man's Sky continues with an overhaul of the save system in patch 1.38 released on PC and PS4 today.

You are now given five save slots and existing saves will be mapped to them. Each slot represents a new game and choice of mode, and has two sub-slots within it, one for auto saving (triggered when exiting your ship, dying, and buying a Freighter or claiming a base) and one for saving manually, via a save point or beacon.

The aim is to make managing saves between game modes "much easier", Hello Games said.

Hot on the heels of the Path Finder update, Hello Games has swooped in with a new patch to address No Man's Sky's outstanding console performance issues. Patch 1.23 now improves performance by up to 5fps on PS4 Pro in its 4K mode, and also adds the ability to lock or unlock frame-rate on both of Sony's PS4 consoles.

It's a double-whammy of good news for PS4 Pro owners though. If you're playing using the 4K output mode (rendering at a native 1800p), the game now avoids noticeable dips under 30fps. It's much improved, and engine optimisations in patch 1.23 keep the game above of the 30fps line, especially useful when paired with the new capped frame-rate feature.

Until now we've no choice but to play this 4K mode completely unlocked, meaning a jarring range of 30-50fps that never felt great in motion. If you want to push the bar with performance still further, No Man's Sky still runs flawlessly at 60fps in 1080p mode, but once again, you need to set your Pro to output at full HD on the system menus. This is pretty much the only outstanding criticism we have of No Man's Sky's PS4 Pro implementation - desirable features like a 60fps lock should be available to all users regardless of how the system menus are configured.

No Man's Sky just received a colossal Foundation Update, drastically expanding the space exploration game's feature list, and developer Hello Games has promised much more to come. While it's been cagey on the details of what that entails, recent signs suggest that the sci-fi game will soon receive land-based vehicles.

The Advertising Standards Authority has confirmed to Eurogamer that it has launched an investigation into No Man's Sky.

The watchdog launched its investigation after receiving "several complaints" about No Man's Sky advertising, a representative told me.

The ASA has the power to have advertisements it believes are in breach of its code of conduct withdrawn, and prevent them from appearing again. If an advertiser refuses to comply with an ASA ruling, it can impose sanctions, such as asking internet search websites to remove a marketer's paid-for search ads.

Shuhei Yoshida, the popular president of Sony's Worldwide Studios, has said he understands why some fans were critical of controversial space survival sim No Man's Sky - and blamed Hello Games' pre-release PR strategy for building up unrealistic expectations.

About 30 hours into No Man's Sky and I'm still loving it, even if its faults are beginning to pile up like a neat mound of Heridium. It's a soft, muted brand of adventure that Hello Games has crafted - "it is to simulated space what Finding Nemo is to the North Atlantic," said Alexis Kennedy for us on Saturday, and he's certainly got a point - so thank heavens for the PC modders who are here to serve up something for those who would like a little more meat on their bones.

No Man's Sky got off to a bumpy launch on PC, but developer Hello Games is confident that it's solved "around 70 per cent" of current support requests with the remaining 30 per cent being dealt with as we speak.

As for the current fixes, they should help anyone whose game failed to save until they died, spawned on a space station without the means to fix their ship, or had their save data corrupted.

Common crashes have been fixed as well, so the game should no longer freeze when warping, scanning, receiving a blueprint, or setting too many waypoints in the galactic map.

No Man's Sky launched to many technical difficulties on both PS4 and Steam. Crashes were common on both platforms and many PC users experienced optimisation issues that brought the framerate to a crawl. But now the game has a patch on both platforms that should alleviate many of these issues.

While Hello Games has yet to release its official patch notes, creative lead Sean Murray said on Twitter that the "PC build adds support for more hardware + improves frame rate at low spec. PS4 improves stability + lots more."

Hello Games released some PC patch notes on Tuesday that explained what the update's beta changed. So that should cover a lot of what's fixed here, though the specifics of the PS4 patch remain a mystery.

Modding of the PC version of No Man's Sky is under way, and modders have begun with a few graphics fixes, as well as some quality-of-life improvements that any player of the game will appreciate. Redditor TaintedSquirrel has a roundup.

No Man's Sky had a troubled PC launch, but developer Hello Games is on the case and just released a new "experimental" Steam branch that players can implement, effectively testing out an upcoming patch before it gets implemented as the new norm.

To access it, players need to right-click on the game from the Library page and select "Properties". From there, select "Betas" and the new branch should be listed in a dropdown menu under "Select the beta you would like to opt into." The code is: "3xperimental".

Reddit user DoktorFeelgood has "maxed out" the starship, exosuit and multi-tool without leaving the starter planet No Man's Sky - proving some interesting things about the way the game systems work in the process.

No Man's Sky has done huge business in the UK, topping the sales chart.

No Man's Sky is Sony's second biggest ever PlayStation 4 launch behind Uncharted 4, Chart-Track said. Remember, that's physical sales only. No Man's Sky also came out in download form on PS4 and on PC.

Hello Games' space title is fifth behind Destiny (PS4), Watch Dogs (PS4), The Getaway (PS2) and The Last of Us (PS3) in terms of new intellectual property across all publishers and Sony formats, Chart-Track added.

No Man's Sky developer Hello Games has detailed an enormous day one patch with far-reaching changes for the game.

Your progress through the procedurally-generated universe of No Man's Sky will now follow one of three set paths. Each will have a "significant impact on what you see later in the game", Hello Games boss Sean Murray has said, and the game's story has been rewritten to allow for multiple endings.

There's also now a far higher chance of player "collision", as you can scan for areas visited by other players and drop by.

When No Man's Sky was unveiled in 2013, one of the many things about it that caught the eye was its music. Now, the people behind the ambitious space game's soundtrack have announced it'll go on sale alongside the game this summer.

Highly-anticipated galactic sandbox game No Man's Sky will launch on PlayStation 4 in June 2016.

Sony just revealed the date during its ongoing Paris Games Week 2015 PlayStation press conference.

Earlier this week there were rumours online that the game would get a surprise launch this week - but it is clear that No Man's Sky studio Hello Games is still deep in development on the ambitious project.

The Late Show host Stephen Colbert is no stranger to video games after having the likes of PewDiePie attend his show, an honour usually bestowed to movie stars and presidential candidates. This time the 51-year-old host gave the prestigious program's spotlight over to Hello Games, the 10-person Guildford-based studio making No Man's Sky.

"It's not the prettiest planet. I've seen better. But I've also seen a lot worse."

During Sony's E3 press conference last night Hello Games' Sean Murray played eye-catching PlayStation 4 game No Man's Sky, showing off combat, exploration and the massive scale of the space game in a five minute demo.

Hello Games' Sean Murray took to the stage at Sony's PlayStation Experience event to show some more footage of the ambitious and exciting No Man's Sky.

The video, below, features over four minutes of footage of the science fiction game. We see a pilot launch, land on a planet, jump out and walk about, before we zoom out to get a glimpse of the hugeness of the game's infinite procedural universe.

Over the holiday Joe Danger developer Hello Game's Guilford office was flooded with the insurance refusing to cover the natural disaster. This left many concerned that the four-person studio's highly anticipated first-person sci-fi epic No Man's Sky would get delayed. Hello Games has updated its blog to let us know that won't be the case and everything's going to be okay.